Mobile telephone devices have become ubiquitous in our society. Unlike conventional landline telephony services, which typically operate in a home or office and are delivered via a wire and enjoy a highly consistent transmission medium, mobile telephone devices are subjected to use under varying radio environments which result in a highly varying speech quality to the end user. One challenge to those designing mobile telephone devices is to design the telephone devices to provide the desired speech and data quality even when the user is using the telephone in challenging and changing radio environments. Further, wireless network operators also want the users of their network to use telephone devices that provide adequate communication quality in all radio environments to ensure that the user has a satisfactory experience using their wireless network. Thus, there are numerous parties who desire to test the quality of communications provided by mobile telephone devices.
There are, however, a wide variety of telephone devices used for communicating over wireless mobile telephone networks. With the proliferation of mobile telephone devices, many designs of telephones have evolved. The different designs of telephone devices result in different performance characteristics for each telephone device. Various design characteristics may impact the quality of the speech and data services provided by a telephone device and its ability to provide communications in varying radio environments. For example, the radio front-end of a telephone device, which drives, in part, the radiated performance (a devices ability to receive and transmit radio signals) of the device may positively or negatively impact the quality of communications in various radio environments. Another factor may be the device's capability to cancel interfering radio signals from wanted radio signals in order to increase the signal-to-noise ratio and thereby improve the quality of communications. Other design factors include (a) the performance of the device's digital signal processor, (b) the design of the device's operating system and associated applications including the handling of TCP/IP communication. As a result, the many different mobile telephone devices have varying performance characteristics due to their design. Thus, different telephone devices operating in the same radio environment provide different qualities of communication.
In addition, another challenge to mobile telephone device manufacturers, and to wireless carriers, is how to comparatively evaluate different model phones across different locations, at different times, and under the differing radio conditions present in live mobile networks. The present invention provides methods and systems to objectively determine the voice quality of different mobile telephones in varying environments even when tested at different times. These and other advantages may be provided by one or more embodiments of the present invention.